Truly innovative organisations move with time, adapting to new trends of creativity, applying every tool that becomes available in their permanent strive to become even more innovative. Office
clubs to boost communication, inspiration voyages to Silicon Valley to learn from the innovation front runners or cloud-based innovation platforms to funnel the creativity of the crowd into the
company’s innovation pipeline. If you want to be best you need the best tools. Is that really true? Let’s have a closer look.

Quality tools or quality systems applied to innovation environments are frequently reported to have a catastrophic impact. Strangling creativity, tying researchers up in a corset of rules,
wasting resources on filling pointless forms. One reason for this depressing outcome might be the confusion of quality tools and quality concepts.

Intending to outsource innovation activities, companies and their management need to decide on the outsourcing business model to be used. The landscape of available models is huge, starting with
outsourcing of small parts of the innovation value chain to Single Service Providers specialising on exactly the required activity and ending with risk shared Strategic Partnerships with
companies having the capability to run large parts of the value chain.